Introducing Epistemic Peripheries

This chapter conceptually introduces “epistemic peripheries” as knowledges which may be “forgotten”, silenced or erased. Moving across temporalities and spatialities, we elucidate structurally marginalized lived experiences and existences that have been historically decentered and suppressed within European modes of thinking. Applying a decolonial, queer, indigenous and Black feminist lens, this chapter explicates the processes through which epistemic peripheries are, in fact, neither forgotten nor invisible. It is in the tension between what is remembered and misremembered, that which is chosen to be seen and unseen, that certain knowledges can be violently re(shaped) as central or peripheral. Yet, those situated within peripheralized localities and epistemes continue to resist in ways that creatively challenge and subvert epistemic binarism.